Marilyn Wolf named department chair

Sep 04, 2019
By Victoria Grdina

Marilyn Wolf

Marilyn C. Wolf has been appointed the new chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She will assume her new position on Sept. 1.

She succeeds Steve Goddard, who served two terms as department chair from 2018 to 2019 and from 2008 to 2013. Goddard is now the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. Vice chair Witawas Srisa-an has acted as interim chair since May.

“With the addition of Dr. Marilyn Wolf, our department maintains the tradition of having strong leadership at the chair position,” Srisa-an said. “CSE is starting many new and exciting initiatives, and we are looking forward to many successes under the leadership of Dr. Wolf.”

Wolf was previously the Rhesa “Ray” S. Farmer Distinguished Chair of Embedded Computing Systems and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Before joining Georgia Tech, she was a faculty member at Princeton University from 1989 to 2007. She also worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1984 to 1989. She earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She is a co-founder of Verificon Corporation, which designs smart camera systems. She’s also assisted in starting several technical conferences, including CODES and MPSoC. Wolf received the ASEE/CSE and HP Frederick E. Terman Award in 2003, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Education Award in 2006, and the IEEE Computer Society Harry H. Goode Memorial Award in 2019. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM as well as an IEEE Computer Society Golden Core member. She has developed a number of techniques for embedded computing, and her research areas have included embedded systems, video and computer vision, and VLSI systems.

Wolf is looking forward to expanding the department’s research and educational programs, which she said are poised for growth.

“I think that the department has a lot of opportunities in front of it, and figuring out how to make the most of those opportunities is going to be an exciting challenge,” said Wolf. “Computer science is still an evolving field and figuring out where the field is going and how the department should be positioned to be a leader in those fields is a wonderful puzzle.”